'Go home Lucy Stone': The women who fought against suffrage and their supporters

This thesis is a study of the organized resistance to female suffrage in the United States. Believing only disaster would follow in the wake of enfranchisement, America's most conservative and wealthy women rallied together to stop the extension of suffrage to women. They began by forming small committees, becoming a full-fledged movement by the late 1800s. Although they ultimately failed, antisuffragists were effective in delaying female suffrage, utilizing the very public practices that they claimed to hate.;What this thesis reveals is the many reasons why women were opposed to female suffrage. It also investigates the backgrounds of several women, such as Josephine Jewell Dodge and Alice Hay Wadsworth, concluding that the movement was led and organized by society's most affluent women and that the campaign was not a monolithic crusade but a combination of several mini-movements that had one goal in mind---to stop female suffrage. Moreover, this thesis examines the influence and contributions of the three main forces behind the antisuffrage movement---big business, liquor lobbyists, and the religious camp.